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Rogue Wave Releases ThreadSpotter With Support for Cray Supercomputers

[September 20, 2012]

Rogue Wave Releases ThreadSpotter With Support for Cray Supercomputers

(Marketwire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) BOULDER, CO -- (Marketwire) -- 09/20/12 --
Rogue Wave Software, the largest independent provider of cross-platform software development tools and embedded components for the next generation of HPC applications, is releasing ThreadSpotter 2012.1 with support for Cray Inc.'s line of Cray XE supercomputers. The strong adoption of its leading performance optimization tool among several major labs drove Rogue Wave to release ThreadSpotter with Cray support. The customer-driven release of ThreadSpotter 2012.1 provides comprehensive performance optimization for single and multi-threaded applications on Cray XE systems.

In order to optimize their applications, a number of leading labs recently adopted previous versions of ThreadSpotter, including UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), CEA - the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, and Jülich Supercomputing Centre. By employing ThreadSpotter, AWE significantly improved code efficiencies and the productivity and performance of its developers. Jülich Supercomputing Centre, which cooperates on the European research projects (H4H und HOPSA), was able to optimize large-scale, real-world codes with ThreadSpotter. For LLNL, ThreadSpotter pointed out loop fusion and data structure transformation tuning opportunities within the critical Livermore Unstructured Lagrangian Explicit Shock Hydrodynamics (LULESH) application that resulted in a 25% increase to serial run time performance and a doubling of parallel performance.

Recognizing the market overlap between large labs that employ Cray supercomputers and customers that require powerful software optimization tools, Rogue Wave decided that developing a new version of ThreadSpotter with support for Cray was a natural product progression. With the new release of ThreadSpotter 2012.1, Cray XE users can now improve performance and gain better efficiencies. The new version of ThreadSpotter has been modified to provide better support on ALPS and to work with schedulers/resource managers PBS Pro, MOAB/Torque, and SLURM. In addition, this version of ThreadSpotter also provides an updated CPU Database that now includes AMD Bulldozer processors, Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge Processors, and IBM Power and BlueGene for Cross-Platform analysis.

"Scientists and engineers expressed to Rogue Wave their need to employ ThreadSpotter to optimize the performance of parallel applications on the Cray XE platform. As Cray Supercomputers are strategic platforms for our customers, we are happy to quickly respond to these requests so our products stay at the cutting-edge of the HPC market," stated Chris Gottbrath, Product Manager at Rogue Wave. "Rogue Wave's ThreadSpotter 2012.1 will help Cray XE users be more productive and produce more efficient programs."
"Cray and Rogue Wave are dedicated to our ongoing collaboration aimed at providing our mutual customers with critical HPC solutions and development tools," said Peg Williams, Cray's Senior Vice President of High Performance Computing Systems. "Rogue Wave's new version of ThreadSpotter is designed to allow developers to better optimize their applications and leverage the extreme power of their Cray XE systems."
ThreadSpotter helps eliminate performance issues by identifying problematic sites in the code where a change could make the program far more efficient. Failure to efficiently use cache memory is a frequent cause of poor performance because the processor has to stall for many cycles waiting for data to be fetched from main memory. The only way to achieve full performance from the CPU is for data to be in the cache. Unlike traditional profilers and performance-counter based tools that gather data, but provide little analysis, ThreadSpotter provides specific guidance on performance issues by identifying them, estimating each issue's importance and rank ordering them. ThreadSpotter then guides the developer to the location in the source code where the issues are located. In many cases, ThreadSpotter provides examples on how code or data structures can be refactored to achieve performance.

About Rogue Wave Software
Rogue Wave Software, Inc. is the largest independent provider of cross-platform software development tools and embedded components for the next generation of HPC applications. Rogue Wave marries High Performance Computing with High Productivity Computing to enable developers to harness the power of parallel applications and multicore computing. Rogue Wave products reduce the complexity of prototyping, developing, debugging, and optimizing multi-processor and data-intensive applications. Rogue Wave customers are industry leaders in the Global 2000, ISVs, OEMs, government laboratories and research institutions that leverage computationally-complex and data-intensive applications to enable innovation and outperform competitors. Rogue Wave is a Battery Ventures portfolio company. For more information, visit www.roguewave.com.